Low-dose rate brachytherapy may provide a viable alternative to external beam radiation and high-dose rate brachytherapy. Although low-dose brachytherapy is most often used for prostate cancer, low-dose brachytherapy is being considered increasingly with respect to other cancers, such as breast cancer.
Although there are encouraging results to suggest that low-dose rate brachytherapy seeds currently used in prostate cancer can eradicate early stage breast cancer, because these seeds were designed to treat prostate instead of breast cancer, there are several clinical issues that may prohibit broad adoption. For example, some medical physicists have expressed concern that the radiation dose delivered to the tissue will be uncertain due to changes in the lumpectomy cavity and seed migration. In addition, there is a great concern that radio-opaque markers in the seeds, used to identify the location of the seeds in post-implant CT scans, will confuse subsequent mammograms by either looking like a local recurrence or hiding a local recurrence in the “shadow” of the radio-opaque marker. In addition, some women may prefer to not have permanent, metal implants in a breast.